Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday May 11, 2018 @11:30PM
from the energy-star-certified dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla's giant Powerpack battery in Australia has been in operation for about 6 months now and we are just starting to discover the magnitude of its impact on the local energy market. A new report now shows that it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% and it has already taken a majority share of the market. It is so efficient that it reportedly should have made around $1 million in just a few days in January, but Tesla complained last month that they are not being paid correctly because the system doesn't account for how fast Tesla's Powerpacks start discharging their power into the grid.

The system is basically a victim of its own efficiency, which the Australian Energy Market Operator confirmed is much more rapid, accurate and valuable than a conventional steam turbine in a report published last month. Now McKinsey and Co partner Godart van Gendt presented new data at the Australian Energy Week conference in Melbourne this week and claimed that Tesla's battery has now taken over 55% of the frequency control and ancillary services (FCAS) services and reduced cost by 90%. "In the first four months of operations of the Hornsdale Power Reserve (the official name of the Tesla big battery, owned and operated by Neoen), the frequency ancillary services prices went down by 90 percent, so that's 9-0 per cent," said Gendt via Reneweconomy. "And the 100MW battery has achieved over 55 percent of the FCAS revenues in South Australia. So it's 2 percent of the capacity in South Australia achieving 55 percent of the revenues in South Australia."

You mean the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The specific model of Samsung that had significant hardware issues. Unlike nearly every model of iPhone, which have had issues with bending, expanding, burning, exploding poor battery life, poor wifi, shitty antennas, cracking screens, unresponsive touch, throttling the CPU on old phones...
If you're going to shill for Apple, at least get your models right.

I'm surprised that this article didn't mention that on the Q1 call, Musk mentioned that he expects to be able to announce a ~1 GWh battery contract this summer:) Gotta love order of magnitude year-over-year growth!

An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video [youtube.com], produced by Vox, discussing it further.

How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" [wikipedia.org] plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.

My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology [greentechmedia.com] succeeds in this regard.

I see what you're saying. But isn't having that surplus power sold off to charge cars and then the cars using it to commute a form of load leveling? If cars charge overnight, that's when electricity use is ordinarily low. I'm sure there's a lot I'm not taking into consideration, plus I've been drinking since 11am, so I don't have a clue.

Overnight charging is an excellent use to pick up extra capacity in baseload generation. However, that extra capacity is there precisely because baseload has long response times, and so is hard to throttle. It doesn't really do anything to reduce needed generation the next day.As someone else noted, solar is daytime, and I think in most areas wind generation works better during the day. Tidal generation though is pretty much time independent.

I see what you're saying. But isn't having that surplus power sold off to charge cars and then the cars using it to commute a form of load leveling?

No, not really. For one thing, the cars can't be charged any other time. For another, they don't offer load leveling until they can be coaxed into giving up some of their power. For example, let's say you have a 120 mile commute and a car with a 200 mile range. You could leave yourself 20 miles of fudge factor and still sell back part of that power during the midday, when it's needed most and your car is sitting around connected to the charging infrastructure. So not only can you charge when the power is ch

It would be dumb in the future NOT to have them plugged at the workplace when that's the time when they could also be charged from solar arrays. AND, in addition to that, recharging them in the afternoon while load-shedding in the order of owners' preferred electricity costs reshapes the duck curve somewhat.

If more cars were electric, the utilities could store all that surplus power in the cars' batteries, no?

Ideally yes. In practice it comes with a number of technical difficulties all of which can eventually be overcome.

What I'm pituring here is some sort of smart meters (not the current gen of wifi connected dumb meters with crappy security), but ones which are aware of the demand in realtime and can instrcut devices to either draw electricity from the grid or put it back.

I don't doubt it's possible and it's not even hard from a technical point of view. It's just that with tens of gigawatts with subsecond response time responding to on-demand pricing (which has a lag), there could be problems with grid-scale oscillations. And that's ignoring the problems with poor security and potential for maniuplation.

Avoiding oscillations is potentially the easy part. Ddistributed and robust algorithms are already in use, even if not in this precise application yet.

1) Do a local slow/no charge override based on local frequency and voltage measurements. That's protective at the simplest level, though can go wrong (see May 2008 GB grid blackouts for 500l people from problems with misconfigured G59 gear). Slightly randomise disconnection times based on severity of voltage/frequency dip.

What I'm pituring here is some sort of smart meters (not the current gen of wifi connected dumb meters with crappy security), but ones which are aware of the demand in realtime and can instrcut devices to either draw electricity from the grid or put it back.

This kind of technology already exists. Industrial AC units are already being controlled by power companies, who determine when thou shalt have cooling based on aggregate demand.

Industrial AC units are already being controlled by power companies, who determine when thou shalt have cooling based on aggregate demand.

And they're much more expensice and tightly controlled than domestic units. The problem isn't the technology for remotely switching on and off power based on demand (or even switching from demand to supply). The problem is scaling it up to a substantial fraction of domestic users without causing serious problems due to nasty chea

The problem isn't the technology for remotely switching on and off power based on demand (or even switching from demand to supply). The problem is scaling it up to a substantial fraction of domestic users without causing serious problems due to nasty cheap low security units.

If history is any indication, they will damn the security, and go full speed ahead.

If history is any indication, they will damn the security, and go full speed ahead.

That unfortunately seems more than likely. Damn security or quality or playing nicely with others in any regard. My guess is that what will happen in that adoption will be slow but steady until the point where it starts causing problems (it's only a problem when the number gets large enough). I think the general crappiness will initially be the dominant factor not security.

But molten-salt is ultimately just another steam generator; it can't act as a capacitor, smoothing surge in milliseconds like these cells do. We STILL need them, no matter what technology we use to generate power.

What will probably be the reality, once we finally get over the suicidal idiocy that is Big Energy as we know it, will be a multi-tier approach with primary generation, 24-72 hour storage like molten salt, and finally high-surge storage like this Tesla project. This of course will be fought every

The current method for keeping the frequency stable is lots of plants with heavy turbines and generators spinning at high speed - 3000 or 3600 RPM. If load increases or decreases, it takes time for all this mass to speed up or slow down, and this keeps the frequency stable.

Molten salt plants use these same, heavy steam turbines, and so will act to keep the network stable like traditional plants.

It is when this first system is not enough that batteries and gas turbines come online, to support the network

Molten salt as storage for electric energy makes no sense. (No heat based storage makes sense; unless, you really want to get rid of the electricity and you simply only want to reuse the heat, e.g. in a bakery)Assume you have 100MWh to sore, you probably get 95MWh into the salt.And as any heat engine hardly can beat the 42% barrier of efficiency, you get maximum 40MWh back from the molten salt.Pumped storage round trip is close to 90%Storing it in a battery is close to 99%Storing it in a EV is also close to

3-5 years is what a laptop battery is expected to provide, 3 years when kept at 100% (which is bad for them) and randomly without warning discharged down super low (which is bad for them) instead of the long-lifecycle capacity patterns that fixed ground installations can use because weight is not really an issue.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries goes into a lot more math, but even EVs limit their batteries to the 25%-85% overall cell capacity for that reason. Fixed installations like this PowerBank can limit it further as needed, generally to the 45%-75% range as design parameters (so only charging to 4.0V instead of the "full" 4.2V per cell) and attempting to keep things in the 65-75% range as much as possible.

In the use-case of this power bank? It's meant to cover the first milliseconds and provide brief power dumps to cover other surges, allowing power generation that takes minutes to shift as load changes. So it's very likely staying inside of that 65-75 sweet-spot and these batteries will last 10+ years without a problem.

Even if degraded then assuming there is space and maintenance costs are not too high the asset can be further sweated. Potentially, they could be offered to a remanufacturer to provide low cost storage for home PV.

Lithium-ion batteries are 100% recyclable. Currently they are not recycled due to economics but that will change in the future either due to regulation or a shift in economics.

Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years.

Actually, for grid scale stuff it's more likely to be every 20 years because they do not need to function at 100% capacity and Tesla has developed excellent technology to prolong the lifespan of their batteries due to their use in EVs. However, that's just for current battery technology. Solid state lithium-ion battery cells should have an increased the capacity and lifespan.

the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal.

Wrong. Lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries are both sustainable solutions.

Is that really true? Last time I checked, nobody had come up with a way to reuse 100% of the electrolyte. They can reclaim all of the cobalt (when used) and some 80% of the lithium, but much of the chemistry is neutralized and then incinerated.

It should be noted that recycling and reusing (for the same purpose) are not the same thing. However, nobody has come up with a way to fully recycle Lithium-ion batteries economically (due to the low price of lithium) which is quite different than nobody being able to do it. Obviously that will change as lithium becomes more scarce. Also, there is little need to worry about the electrolyte since solid state Lithium-ion batteries are going to become the new norm.

There's a NOVA show called search for the super battery. Lithium (like tesla's) is great for cars and phones because it's lightweight and stores a reasonable charge, but somewhat expensive. After talking about lithium batteries they said pretty much anything (not nobles) could be made into a battery. Then they put up a list of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust (among them Si, S, and O) and said if you didn't mind a battery that was large and heavy, pretty soon there'll be batteries made out of that stuff cheaply. The ingredients are plentiful and making them was cheaper, for example no need for a humidity-controlled clean room meant they could be made on a large but efficient assembly line with machines made for food handling. Also nontoxic, the interviewer scooped some up and ate it, said it tasted like sand.

So yeah, Australia, Nevada, and Texas all have plenty of vacant land they could put big, heavy, cheap batteries on, and store power with. Save the lithium for batteries that go places.

An ongoing issue with operating and maintaining an electrical grid is how to balance electrical generation with electrical consumption. The two vary throughout the day; for example, solar energy adds a surge of power to the grid during sunlight hours, while peak consumer demand for electricity happens around 7-8pm. If you have five minutes, I suggest you watch this video [youtube.com], produced by Vox, discussing it further.

How do electrical companies then compensate for the differences? Or for contingencies, like when an electrical generator needs to be brought offline for emergencies or maintenance? This is where "ancillary services" [wikipedia.org] plays a vital importance. Utilities are desperate to find an efficient way to store surplus power generated when supply is higher than demand, so that it can then be released when demand is higher than supply. Currently, when supply is too high, it is reduced (ex: solar panels and wind turbines turned off), wasting energy. When supply is too low, expensive generators are brought online to meet demand. But if we can make battery technology cost-efficient to store surplus electricity for peak-demand use, it would save vast sums of money, as this article highlights.

My only real concern is how much battery waste this will lead to. Cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. Until superconductors or high-energy-plasma devices become reality, the only somewhat-environmentally-safe way to store energy long-term is thermal. Hopefully molten-salt storage technology [greentechmedia.com] succeeds in this regard.

Ancillary services are generally not load peaking support but rather VAR and frequency control in relatively rare/extreme conditions, for short durations.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that the cells need to be replaced every 3-5 years. The cells Tesla uses in the power packs are rated for 5000 full cycles before degrading to 80% of their original capacity. If they cycled from 100% to 0% every single day of the year they would last 13.7 years. If you had to replace them every 5 years then it would mean that the system was completely filling and draining more than 2X per day. The reality of the system and the way it is being used is more likely to se

That's also assuming there is zero power coming from other primary, secondary or tertiary sources. It'll last much longer when other sources of power are a available... apparently long enough to do it's job, which is to smooth out the power distribution just long enough to bring other sources of reliable energy online.

Frequency regulation is required even where power is mostly provided by fossil or nuclear as demand can vary quickly. There are a few trends that have reduced the requirement from domestic consumers such as fragmentation of TV habits, though.

If Tesla is not getting paid because the accounting system can't keep up with their service profile, isn't some part of 90% savings due to the fact that the consumer isn't paying the bill? If so, how much of it?

Presumably, the market price is sampled every 5 to 10 minutes. If demand becomes too close to supply levels for one of these periods, the open market cost goes up, new power stations are brought in line until the open market cost goes down again. Tesla's battery activates within a minute, so the market price doesn't change. The market system pricing only needs to be sampled as the speed of the power plant with the shortest activation time.

My understanding is that the model is based on slow spin-up fossil plants, and doesn't accurately account for a battery that can go from 0 to 100% in a fraction of a second.

That is correct. The fastest Frequency Control and Ancillary Services market in Australia is billed in 6 second changes and this is the primary of the 8 FCAS markets that the Tesla battery operates in. This is the same market used by emergency systems such as load-shedding / rapid loading. We used to participate in the latter service where I worked as we had some small gas turbines on site. The AEMO's control system could request setpoint changes every 4 seconds. So if somewhere a power plant tripped off line, it would be several seconds before AEMO knew, several seconds more for them to send us a signal, and then up to a minute for us to add a pathetically small about of power to or from the grid in response, and that's assuming we don't trip our turbines on load as a response to the swinging demand.

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/medi... [aemo.com.au] This report details some of the performance differences compared to conventional FCAS providers. Specifically the two graphs on page 6 are quite telling. As is the following quote:"The Market Ancillary Services Specification (MASS), which specifies each market ancillary service, and how it is to be quantified, does not address performance requirements for regulation FCAS. All regulation FCAS is essentially considered to be equal and interchangeable, and providers are paid the same price per MW of enabled service, regardless of performance." And that is Tesla's main gripe.

Additionally there is the contingency response. On page 7 of the above report is shown how Tesla's battery added 20MW to correct a frequency event as a result of a coal plant tripping offline in less than 5 seconds. Tesla started correcting the issue before the AEMO would even have sent a signal out that there was a problem. And again the note says they don't get paid for this awesome performance.

The AEMO have been talking about adding a sub 1second market to the FCAS and overhauling the FCAS market since early last year. And so has every other major grid operator around the world as this fast technology comes on to the market. A lot of research has been done into this not only because the likes of Telsa want to get paid to play, but also if more of these services come online and the control system is incapable of reacting fast enough then it could lead to more instabilities than they were trying to solve in the first place.

The system operator (AEMO) needs to overhaul its policies and procedures for control as well as billing. Something that can 'jump on' to the grid faster than the operator can schedule power reserves and bring them on line risks system instability. Once you have a bunch of (competing) battery operators and they all sense the frequency sag, you can't have them all cranking up their outputs at once in an uncoordinated fashion.

It's going to be interesting, what with some of the old timers in the power business

isn't some part of 90% savings due to the fact that the consumer isn't paying the bill?

The problem here is one of sampling. When you provide a service that occurs faster than than your customer can record for it and account for it, it's a tall order to ask the customer to pay for something that they can't even see happening or having any effect.

To be clear everyone knows what is going on on both sides of the transaction here, but philosophically it's like me charging you for my mythical powers keeping the terrorists from killing you. Have you been killed by a terrorist today? Of course not. I

Seriously, any of the old coal plants that are being shut down, would be ideal to simply install a heavily insulated salt tank and use it for converting excess electricity to heat and then load following as needed. It could be backed up by nat gas if needed. Nice cheap way to convert old equipment into cheap storage.

Converting a high quality form of energy - electricity - into a low grade form (heat) to store it is a terrible idea. The conversion rate for solar thermal is only about 40%. Some form if kinetic or potential energy are much better - several can do 80% or better.

The battery's purpose isn't power generation, it's load smoothing, like a capacitor in electronics. It has to be able to provide (or absorb) a lot of power in a very short time (milliseconds to seconds) to keep the grid in spec; solar can't do that, fuel-powered generators respond too slow, etc.

So even if they built a solar/salt power station, they'd still need the battery.

The battery's purpose isn't power generation, it's load smoothing, like a capacitor in electronics. It has to be able to provide (or absorb) a lot of power in a very short time (milliseconds to seconds) to keep the grid in spec; solar can't do that, fuel-powered generators respond too slow, etc.

So even if they built a solar/salt power station, they'd still need the battery.

Because of the large number of inverters in a utility-scale solar plant, it can provide reactive power, even when not feeding the grid, ie, when the sun isn't shining.

In Germany, in 2012 the law was changed to require certain mechanisms for load smoothing in solar generation. Medium to large solar plants have to provide a "remote control" for the grid operator to reduce their output in case of excess generation.

Small solar plants may use a fixed maximum output of 70% of installed capacity instead. That cuts the generation peaks at noon when solar output is highest, and also helps to avoid excess generation.

Curtailment of wind and solar increases the cost of wind and solar. It becomes more common/necessary as the percentage of solar/wind to total annual generation increases. In Germany, at 15% Wind, 5% solar, they are just starting to see some need for curtailment.

That is different than VAR management, which solar/wind inverters can perform if they have that capability and it is being used. I believe that is what the 2012 requirement addressed instead of, or along with curtailment capability. .

Germany has about 40% renewables (2017).2016 Wind power was 15% and PV about 6%

Due to lucky circumstances it was 2017 much higher.For the nitpickers, electricity from brown and hard coal 2016 was 37% (40% 2015). I don't find an accurate link for 2017 at the moment. But it was a record year for renewables, something around 39.5%

. We are talking about a periodic compensation that happens 50 times per second in a 50Hz net.

This article is about power reserve, which is about compensating fluctuations in the power demand on the net. We are talking about time frames anywhere from milliseconds to hours here

The cost savings referred to in the title are entirely due to ancillary services, where grid disturbances can impact reliability due to inadequate incoming transmission lines. This has nothing to do with solar output fluctuations, however at times of low solar output that portion of the Australian grid is even more exposed to transient causing events.

This is the primary purpose of the batteries, not for smoothing the solar generation intermittency. In fact, the batteries cannot be fully utilized for that

Reality is, a new power plant in every city. Basically every residence in the burbs with their entire roof with solar panels. One battery pack for their household and one battery pack for the grid. The power station and grid is already built, all you need is the generators, solar panels and batteries and every typical western city now has a new already build power station and they only need to fit it out. Reason why a second battery pack, it takes surplus energy from homes and uses it for commercial and med

Well it was built to stabilise a nearby wind farm, but yeah I don't think it cares where the power comes from to charge it.

The Australian Energy Market Operator, which operates the grid, is essentially a large integer linear program (CPLEX, I believe). It know what equipment is attached to the distribution grid and what the demand is, and it decides what lines get turned on (and in which direction; the Bass Straight connection can work both ways, for example) and whether storage systems are storing or draining and whether new turbines get turned on. It optimises for overall cost.

The thing that complicates it is that the Hornsdale battery reacts faster than the integer linear program. A pumped hydro system (such as you find in the Snowy Mountains) can't turn from storing to generating anywhere near as fast as the battery can. So while the AEMO is working how how best to balance the grid, Hornsdale has already started doing it.

That's one of the reasons the existing power companies didn't like it: they all realised that they wouldn't get paid as much because by the time AEMO decided who should be pumping energy into the system, Hornsdale would already be doing it.

Seems like a bad idea to me. Grids rely on one entity being in control and calling the shots. When that control is lost and everyone starts doing their own thing, the potential for a mass blackout increases substantially.

The point of Hornsdale is to provide power REALLY fast to keep the grid in balance (in terms of frequency and voltage) should there be a sudden drop in power output of a major generator or generators ( wind farms or solar plants) or a sudden spike in demand in order to then allow slower sources of power like gas turbines to spin up and provide proper replacement to the grid.

Its entirely possible that (in certain circumstances) the sudden spike in demand or drop in supply will only be very short and Hornsdal

It wasn't. It was built to stabilise the grid, the goals are slightly different.

A power grid requires a precise balance between supply and demand to exist at all times. If that balance is disturbed, then there can be rapid collapse. This happened in the major South Australia blackout in 2016; which occurred when a major power line failed causing a supply deficit. The deficit was large and most of the major power plants in the region were shut down to allow wind and solar to operate. Wind and solar farms have no supply response capability, so could not assist. The few fossil fuel plants which were active at the time used all their reserve power to make up the deficit. This should have been enough to stabilise the grid, however, the system continued to deteriorate due to an unexpected problem: the wind farms in the region started shutting down on an undocumented (*) safety system which protects the wind turbines from grid instability; this caused a chain reaction making the grid instability progressively worse, until collapse was assured.

The grid operator AEMO (like grid operators in other countries) pays generators (and other companies) for grid stability services, which means a capability to rapidly increase or decrease demand/supply in the event of a grid imbalance.

Due to the nature of the SA grid, with weak long power lines, low demand and high wind/solar generation without the capability for supply response, the fossil power plants in the region were being paid huge grid stability fees to run their plants at idle, just so that they could step on the gas in the event of a power line failure or power plant failure.

The wind farm operator decided to get in on this stability services market by procuring a battery grid stability system. With the battery, they have secured a long-term contract with AEMO for supply of 30 MW-20 minute stability services. The battery is oversized for this, and allows the battery owner to bid for supply of additional stability services on a day-to-day basis when prevailing grid conditions require additional supply of stability services.

The spare battery capacity when not being reserved for grid stability usage, can be used by the battery owner for price arbitrage - charging using low cost overnight power and discharging at peak times when power costs are high. However, the main business case was income from supply of stability services. The key issue here is that the performance and location of the battery are ideal for grid stability services and its generous supply has greatly reduced the market price of stability services.

(*) - generators connected to the grid have to have "fault ride through" capability - so that if there is a grid voltage anomaly, or a short grid interruption, the generator must not shut down. While the output is allowed to reduce in the event of low or absent grid voltage, it must immediately be restored once normal grid voltage returns. For example, if there is a brownout at 50% of normal voltage, the generator must not shut down for at least 1 second. In SA, the wind turbines officially complied with the ride through capability required and declared to the grid operator. However, the manufacturer included an undocumented setting which limited the number of ride through events in a given time period - once this limit was exceeded the ride through capability was disabled and the turbines would trip immediately on a grid problem. This was not declared to the grid operator and hence not included in their simulations and stability calculations.

skip the solar portion. Just heat the salt with excess electricity and then be able to use the heat to drive steam. However, do note that even in that case, it STILL does not respond as fast as batteries. These guys are making a grid that should actually destroy less electronics on it than anything in America or Europe.

Your house probably runs 8-15kWh a day, depending on how stupid you are with your energy usage. (you can probably run your house a WEEK on a single charge of your Tesla.)

8kWh/day is an average draw of 333 watts/h 15kWh is an average draw of 630watts/h

to 'sink' 8kW into a battery in an 8 hour day, you need a thousand watts of solar. which is a single mid-size panel. if you want to over-engineer and be certain you have plenty, you go with 3x to three thousand watts. that's three small panels.

for 15kWh daily, you need a minimum of two thousand watts, or about six thousand to be certain.

you want to blast that big window AC unit? double the size of the system / daily load. (you can still easily use the tesla 100kWh battery, up to a ~50kWh daily usage.

You guys have no clue how simple switching would be, and don't bother wasting your time doing any legitimate research. it's kinda sad.

Not necessarily, because the "benchmark" used here was "conventional steam turbine". Steam turbines indeed do take quite a few (tens) of minutes while to take the load depending on their status.

Gas turbines on the other hand do not, and neither does hydro. Both are commonly used for load balancing specifically for this reason. The comparison is... odd. Having read the paper, I'm assuming that this is some kind of a unique market that didn't actually have access to any common spinning reserve sources. The size of the market, with 30MW being sufficient for all of its load balancing for the time tested appears to confirm it. This seems to be a very localized grid with minimal interconnections with outside world for load balancing purposes. Most of the lucrative markets in the world are large interconnected ones.

Because the initial problem the big battery was meant to solve the problem of the link between the states having problems/ being disconnected. As an added bonus it makes the entire countries grid more stable, but that wasn't its main role. Mostly it was put in because they are relying heavily on wind/solar and need the balancing due to that.If the link goes down again, they can stabilise their own section instead of having a blackout of the entire state.

SA power prices are some of the most expensive in the world. At one point they were the most expensive. Minimal interconnection has driven up the price, gold plating of the distribution network and generators that game the market to get maximum price.

Ultimately the cost of privatisation. This battery is well overdue and has effectively handicapped existing generators from gaming the market.

The obvious question is, why won't government step in and manage the distribution by capping profits to certain percentage of revenue? This is a fairly common action to take when privatizing large monopolistic actors such as power grid providers.

Heck, Australian investors actually own a sizable chunk of my nation's power grid. We had problems with them just raising prices to the maximum allowed on yearly basis. That's why you put such limits in place. To prevent monopolistic, anti-competitive actors from ra

This is industrial deployment, not hipster tech. Every little bit of the tech you're overbuilding raises prices for everyone.

We could certainly put a power generation on every corner. It would cost you, just as the kind of deployment you're suggesting would. But it is possible, and it would certainly improve power factor of inductive load dominated sub-grids and transformers as you put it.

One thing that most people forget in industrial deployment, is that you need to get it just right. Not too much, and not

What is it that you think this thread is talking about? The paper specifically talks about battery usage in place of spinning reserve.

Source of steam is pretty irrelevant in the turbine for this purpose. What matters is that steam turbine takes a while to take load even when it's spun up. Gas turbine, not so much. Which is why you generally don't use steam turbine as low latency spinning reserve, and instead use a gas turbine or a hydro setup on a nearest river.

Gas turbine on the other hand can be installed pretty much anywhere. I'm speaking from personal experience, which is on pretty much the opposite side of the world, where there is some elevation and some flowing rivers.

But in most cases, gas turbine is probably the most reliable, quick and resilient after hydro when it comes to spinning reserve.

Actually, Gas turbines are still too slow for truly handling the frequencies and load following. However, batteries are far too expensive to handle the load for LONG periods of times. The combo of these really does make good sense. As to using steam, yeah, a bit surprised, but they are probably taking a couple of their old systems and using it for that.

They don't have to. Grids have existed for something around a hundred years now. Pretty much anything and everything hooked to the grid can handle short term frequency fluctuations. It's literally required to.

Producing "better than needed" is of negative value in industrial capacity, because it means you overbuilt it. The key aspect of engineering on industrial scale is getting the product into the sweet spot, where it's just good enough to meet the need. Which means that end client pays for his exact needs, and not extra needs he doesn't have.

Good point. Still frequencies and voltage DO matter to a number of equipment esp electronics. Battery combined with steam (which is more cheaper to run than turbines) appears to be a decent solution. I just wonder if it is cheaper and cleaner.

The grid isn't screwed. It's actually in excellent shape and getting it into that position has been a fundamental drive in the retail power price. The so called "gold plating" of our grid, combined with a disperse population, traditional generation far away from population centres, and most recently home solar all contribute to the high price.

How does home solar contribute? Well a portion of our electricity bill goes to grid maintenance. In my own state over 30% of houses have solar panels. That's 30% no lo